Can you be too comfortable?
Comfort, Fragility, & Risk-Taking
Your Journal Prompts for This Week:
How do I know when I am stepping outside of my comfort zone? How does my body & mind respond?
How often do I step out of my comfort zone? How do I feel about this?
What can I do to help myself explore areas that are less comfortable but potentially highly rewarding?
One of my freelance gigs allows me to do production work for a lot of yoga teacher trainings and classes. Before the holiday, I had the pleasure of getting to work on a Yin Yoga teacher training led by Bernie Clark. Something Bernie said about our physical bodies and practice really stuck with me, on a level that goes well beyond the physical:
"Comfort builds fragility."
Bernie was speaking of our bones and muscles, particularly in the feet. They've made shoes over the years to maximize our comfort, creating features such as padded arch support. As a result, our feet are less able to adapt to less comfortable situations--we didn't have to build up that flexibility or strength in our feet that our ancestors may have had long ago, who walked barefoot or with hardly any support at all. And this means our feet have actually become MORE fragile over time, as we evolved and developed modern comforts.
Look, I love comfort as much as the next person. I love to be cozy, and that was only amplified by all our time at home during the pandemic. And we so often talk about slowing down, resisting the hustle culture, and overall making things easier on ourselves, and I do love that shift.
But after all this time of being a student of yoga and now a teacher, it doesn't surprise me to realize that this, too, requires a balance: There are times for comfort, and there are times when we are meant to move out of that zone in order to transform, elevate, or ascend. If we simply stay in our comfort zones, how will we build the strength and resilience we need to move to the next level? Is it possible to be TOO comfortable?
I've been talking about this with some of my communications clients, individuals who are looking to tell their stories and share their messages with their communities. So often we stop short of sharing our stories, or the full stories, because it gets uncomfortable. Sometimes we would rather just post the same types of posts that we've been used to because we've got that formula down. But what if we stepped out of that comfort zone, and gradually allowed ourselves to get used to different or perhaps more vulnerable states?
I encourage you to explore this with the journal prompts above, and see what your relationship is like with your comfort zone. Feel free to share any insights you gain with me--I'd love to hear them!
With much love & gratitude,
Marcy